Monday, December 15, 2014

My best friend in
college, Bill Ingalls, has just published an astonishing book about
his year in Vietnam. It is insightful, harrowing, occasionally funny
and utterly frank – an account of a onetime Soldier of the Month
getting by with pot, booze, a defiant attitude – and a bit of luck.

He operated a
road grader – sitting six feet above the ground, a perfect target
for any sniper – especially during a nerve-jangling stretch near
the Cambodian border when he helped construct a Special Forces
camp. In between, his Army life often consisted of “backbiting, threats,
bribery and blackmail” – while wheeling-dealing, trading
Philippine army guys diesel fuel in return for pot.

The self-published book
is Snakes, Rain and the Tet Offensive: War Stories with Photos,
based on 50
letters he wrote to his
then-wife Faith Rogers, with
some later-day commentary added, and
274 photos he took with a
used East German 35 mm he
bought for
$15.

His
letters pull the reader
directly back to the moment, as
his discussion of family finances: “You
should get about $210 or so this month,” after
he takes $40 in cash for his expenses. He writes he could get another
$40 a month if he's promoted to SP-4, but “I
refuse to kiss ass for it.”

No
glorifying the war for him. As he put it in the introduction: “It
was an ugly war without a real reason for being beyond the political
hysteria of the time. I hated it then, and I hate it now. When I
visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, I cried. It
could have been me with my name on that wall.”

Some 58,000 American soldiers died
protecting South Vietnam – a country that ceased to exist after
the United States finally
conceded defeat. To put that in perspective, 4,500 Americans have
died in Iraq and 2,400 in Afghanistan in the decade-plus we've been
mired in those two countries.

We
were roommates at the
University of Colorado. He was a bright guy who didn't march to
anyone else's drummer – the kind of student who doesn't
automatically parrot back what instructors wanted to hear. He might
read Thomas Wolfe for the fun of it, but blow off a lit class because
he considered the prof pretentious. After several years, he had a grade point of something
like 1.95, and the university informed him that since he didn't have
the required 2.0 he'd have to sit out a semester or so.

In the mid-1960s that
meant one thing: Vietnam.

Rather than become a
canon-fodder draftee, he decided to enlist for three years, so he
could choose a specialty that would (in theory) keep him out of
harm's way. He ended up driving a road grader for the 362nd
Engineering Company. In August 1967, he was sent to Tay Ninh Base, 50
miles northwest of Saigon.

Ingalls Today

When he arrived, his
assigned machine was inoperable. He figured out how to fix it
himself. “I was getting paid to operate a road grader, and I did
the very best I could at all times. I had a job to do and I did it.
Being totally against the war, and shirking work, are two different
topics for me.”

Not that the work always
made sense. Once an ornery sergeant ordered him to cut a drainage
ditch right across a road used by Vietnamese workers. The workers
were puzzled/angry about having to walk around the swampy ditch. When
the sergeant left, Ingalls filled the ditch back in. “I also fixed
drainage problems for the local farmers when they needed help, which
I think went a long way toward keeping me alive.”

But he also learned not
to carry tools on the grader – because kids stole them from the tool box.

In October 1967 – just
his third month – he was named Soldier of the Month for his
company, but his relationships with superiors quickly deteriorated.
“I just wasn't able to keep my mouth shut,” about the war or
stupid orders. He turned down a chance to go to officer candidate
school.

More alluring was “dopers' corner – strange music
late into the night. Odd smells and an anarchistic ambiance.” He
passed guard duty sometimes by reading Wolfe
and Somerset Maugham.

He quickly learned the
art of being a dealer, like Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22,
occasionally draining his fuel tank to get pot, a “high quality
rain suit” or a tubeless tire patch kit, particularly important
because he was getting a flat at least once a week. “My high point
came when I negotiated steak and ice cream for roughly for three
months of Sunday dinners in exchange for fixing the drainage on a …
(food) storage yard.”

In December, his group
was assigned to help construct a Special Forces base near the
Cambodian border – close to the trails that North Vietnamese
soldiers used to infiltrate the south.

A Man and His Machine 1967

Attempts to clear the
jungle led immediately to enemy barrages. The first night, the
nervous engineers fired their M-14s into the darkness at the
perceived enemy locations, not thinking of the Special Forces set up
on the perimeters. The next morning, a pissed Special Forces officer
said some of the M-14 rounds had hit his men and if happened again,
his guys would turn around and fire at the engineers.

“The fighting was so
continuous that I didn't take my boots off for two weeks,” he
writes.

Everybody was jumpy. A soldier on the back of a truck
extended his rifle so his buddy could grab it and leap up on the
truck. Without thinking, the soldier kept his finger on the trigger
and when his buddy grabbed the barrel, his finger squeezed, killing
his buddy with a shot to the chest.

Ingalls heard bullets
whiz past him – like the sound of buzzing bees – but road graders
operated in areas that had already been cleared of vegetation. Much
more exposed were the operators of the Rome plows, assigned to
knocking down the jungle to make a clearing, with the enemy often
lurking a few feet away.

“A plow is the most
hazardous duty in Vietnam for the engineers … they're easy to
ambush and because of the noise made by the plow, the operator can't
hear anything.” The Rome operators tended to misfits, “people who
don't get along in the army at all. Ex-Hell's Angels, guys who get in
fights all the time.”

Near the Cambodian border, the road grader was parked in a trench to protect it from enemy fire.

In late January, the area
quieted down. Ingalls didn't know it at the time, but the enemy
troops were done moving south and were now attacking South Vietnamese
cities across a broad front during the Tet Offensive.

The lull didn't last
long. One day a convoy was ambushed about a mile from camp. A young
sergeant rounded up 11 guys to rescue the wounded. “He told me to
climb aboard as well, but I refused, citing the first commandment of
all heavy equipment operators – never abandon your equipment when
attacked. He was pissed, but I sensed that what he was doing was
seriously wrong. All the guys on the truck looked frightened. They
had no idea what to do.”

The truck stormed
straight into the ambush. All were killed. “They never even got a
chance to get off the back of the truck. Stupid waste of life.”

Americans were dying all
the time, of course. Only one incident Ingalls witnessed became a
news story. It concerned a Rome plow operator named Thomas Van Putten. At
the time of the ambush, he had only a week left in country, and a
buddy offered to take his plow assignment. Van Putten ended up in the convoy as a gunner on a scraper. The Viet Cong
captured him. A year later, an emaciated Van Putten appeared: He'd escaped after being a prisoner for a year, serving as a VC mule.

By that time, Ingalls was
back in Boulder, where he graduated with a degree in history. The
marriage didn't last. “I can't say that the Army destroyed my
marriage, but something did, that's for sure,” he writes in a
postscript. “By the time I got out of the army I knew it wasn't
going to last, and we called it quits within three or four years.”

Ingalls in 2014: He's still a car buff. This 1929 ModelA was handed down to him by his father. He recently gave it to his daughter Ursula.

He became a small
businessman, specializing with considerable success in niche corners
of the auto industry. He's now retired, living in California. Deb,
his wife of 37 years and a professional typesetter, helped design the book. (I was among a bunch of people who gave him him
advice on the first draft, and he rewarded me with a free copy.)

The first edition is a
mere 150 copies. The price is a hefty $90 – because of the huge
expense of printing color photos. It's available at
www.warofwords.co – with
free shipping.

If that sells out, he may
think of a larger, cheaper hard-copy edition, or an electronic color
edition. Electronic would lower the price to $9.99, he says, but
because of the size of the pages and photos, it likely would need to
be read on a desktop.

I was fascinated by his
accounts of the absurdity of the war, but the book could attract a
completely different readership with the photos and accounts of all
the heavy construction equipment. Though they sometimes broke down under brutal conditions, the machines were pretty damn tough. (An enemy shell
once knocked an inch-and-a-half hole through an engine block and the
damn thing kept going.)

He hasn't lost any of his
old individualism. In this age of Youtube and videos everywhere, he's
built a full-fledged sound studio in his garage, producing (among
other things) movie-length radio dramas and much shorter book reviews that
he's marketing to radio stations.

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Glenn Terry, Coconut Grove activist and mangohead extraordinaire, has a moving tribute to his friend Mark Reno on his blog, The Grove Guy. The report on a memorial service at the family home in Kendall includes a rare recent photograph of Mark's sister, Janet, former U.S. attorney general, who announced in 1995 that she had Parkinson's Disease. She is shown in a wheelchair at the memorial service. Mark, among many other things, was a onetime professional alligator wrestler. His -- and Janet''s -- parents were celebrated Miami journalists. .

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

John Dunlap, Jungle
Island's new president, has managed to boost admission revenue while
slashing labor costs by 40 percent, but the long-troubled tourist
attraction still showed a net operating loss of $813,435 for the
first eight months of this year, 51 percent worse than the loss for
the same period last year.

Dunlap, 37, was brought
in last year from San Diego to transform the property, and he's
announced plans to create a “real jungle experience” for
tourists, including swimming, zip lines and a beach. “Our goal is to
be Miami's water attraction,” he said in a cover story by this
reporter in the Biscayne Times October edition, entitled The Long,
Dismal Saga of Watson Island, availableHERE.

“Jungle
Island is healthy and thriving,” a
spokeswoman
said
in an email Wednesday morning. “While year-over-year admissions
were up through August, a host of new (2014)
special events and programs have been implemented which has driven
down current year profitability.

“However, all
of these initiatives are expected to make a positive impact to the
park in the years to come. As an example, we recently transformed an
un-groomed and underutilized parcel of land into a spectacular sandy
beach with a floating aqua park to take advantage of Jungle Island’s
prime location on Biscayne Bay and to expand the average length of
stay,” the spokeswoman said. “The installation came at a one-time
cost of over $300,000.”

Meanwhile,
another major player on Watson Island, Flagstone Property Group, has
filed a motion to intervene in a citizen's lawsuit against the city
that is intended to block the development, and a Flagstone
spokeswoman has come forward to say the proposed Island Gardens
project has many positive elements.

At time of publication of
the Biscayne Times story, government
sources had not responded to two requests for information: The city
of Miami on Jungle Island's financial reports and state wildlife
regulators on the attraction's perimeter fencing requirements. Both
entities have since supplied the requested reports.

State regulators say that
Jungle Island doesn't need to meet many requirements because the
tigers caged there are only temporary, even though most of the cats
have been there for years. More on that later.

BIG SAVINGS IN
OUT-SOURCING

The Jungle Island
financial reports provided by the city reveal major changes since
Duncan took over in June 2013, although most changes didn't start to
show up on the financials until the start of 2014.

The biggest move
was out-sourcing many of the park functions, including food
concessions, the banquet hall, gift shot and photo shoots. The
records show that Ovations, which runs the food and banquet
operations, pays Jungle Island 30 to 35 percent of its revenues while
picking up all food and labor costs.

Deals like this have
dropped the park's employee costs – including
wages, benefits and worker's comp – from $4.24 million in the first
eight months of 2013 to $2.53 million for the
same period in 2014.

“Overall
cost and the number of jobs provided to the local economy is largely
unchanged,” the spokeswoman said.
“We have a joint venture agreement with Ovations. All employees
under Ovations are Jungle Island employees. ... No Miami based Jungle
Island jobs were lost with the shift of these services to third party
suppliers. In fact, Jungle Island’s plans to add new attractions to
the park will result in job creation.”

The financial report
doesn't mention how many people the attraction employs – a crucial
issue because Jungle Island received a federal loan of $25 million to
build the facility – on condition that it employ at least 603
people, according to county officials.

Dunlap told Biscayne Times
that the park is in full compliance with its loan promises but didn't
provide exact employment figures. “We expect that Jungle Island
will be forthcoming with that data,” the county told Biscayne Times.

Another major change:
Expanding special events. That helped boost admission revenue from
$3.7 million for the first eight months of 2013 to $3.9 million for
the same period this year.

One example: Winter World
Island, which featured a beach snow machine. These promotions
increased attendance – but at a cost. Special events expenses were
$329,000 for 2014, compared to a mere $7,000 for the same period last
year.

“We
are putting a greater emphasis on special events in order to broaden
our reach and attract new guests to the park,” the
spokeswoman said.
“However, both figures do not accurately represent special projects
in the same category. We also introduced new after-hour events this
year and brought in additional labor to service them. Examples
include Africa Nights and the current Terror in the Jungle Halloween
attraction, which employs 80 cast members.”

The financial report
indicates that Jungle Island is current with its rent payments –
paying the city $545,000 for the first eight months.

NO NEED FOR A
PERIMETER FENCE?

Because Jungle Island has
tigers and other animals considered potentially dangerous, it is
regulated by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

No state official was
made available before the Biscayne Times deadine, but a spokeswoman
said that Jungle Island was in full compliance with state
regulations. She sent along a copy of the rules that indicated
generally an eight-foot-high perimeter fence is required, but that
older facilities, such as Jungle Island, don't have to abide by that
rule.

Jeff Shimonski, the
attraction's former vice president of facilities, said that while the
fencing of the individual cages is strong, he
was concerned that there were gaps in the perimeter fence. Dunlap
says that, as a former zoo director, he understands fencing
requirements and Jungle Island has no problems.

After publication of the
BT article, the state spokeswoman said that upon further checking
Jungle Island didn't need a perimeter fence because the “cats
currently at the facility are there in travel status only.”

The tigers are owned by
an outside company, but Shimonski, who left earlier this year after
almost 40 years with the attraction, says “I'm not sure how one
would define 'travel status.' The cats are there for years.
Occasionally one is moved for health or other concerns.”

FLAGSTONE SPEAKS
OUT

Bahar
Bayarktar, director of communications for Flagstone Property Group,
sent a statement on Wednesday: “Construction
of Island Gardens started earlier this year, encompassing multiple
projects including the development of North America's first
super-yacht marina and a multi-acre public use waterfront art park,
all of which will be major engines for economic growth, community
development and tourism for South Florida. We are excited about the
progress, which will help create thousands of jobs to the local
economy, and bring in millions in economic impact.”

She
said the construction project could pay over $500 million to workers.
“When doors open in 2017, Island Gardens will create 3,000 jobs,
providing approximately $72 million in wages to local residents and
afford millions in additional revenues” for
city, county and schools.

A
far less upbeat view is held by the Coalition against Causeway Chaos.
Two of its members last month sued the city, saying that political
leaders had violated their own charter in allowing Flagstone to pay
less than market value rent for its Watson Island holdings.

The
lawsuit, filed by Stephen Herbits and Sharon Kerby Wynne, complains
that the city's own reports show that Flagstone should be paying more
than $7 million in annual rent when the project is completed, not the
$2 million the contract calls for.

Flagstone
has been planning the long-delayed project since 2001, when it first
signed a deal with the city.

Critics have complained that the Flagstone development really isn't under way yet, with the company only doing some underwater surveying as it prepares to dredge for the marina.

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Cast of
characters: a UM professor emeritus, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux
Klan, a Norwegian doctor who defends
the 9/11 Al-Qaeda attackers, a British medical journal, an Israeli health center and others,
including a cameo appearance by Fidel Castro.

The drama
began two-plus months ago in the Lancet, a widely respected British
medical journal, when five doctors and
scientists submitted a
letter decrying Israel's bombing of Gaza.

That
led to swirls of charges and counter-chargers, bringing
to the fore two main issues – to what extent
medicine should get involved in politics and how easy
it is for opponents of Israeli military
actions to find themselves
embracing old-fashioned anti-Semites.

Murray Epstein

The University
of Miami connection is Murray Epstein, a nephrologist and
professor emeritus of medicine who continues to lead clinical
investigation studies in the United States and European Union. His
role comes later in the story.

The
maelstrom began in July when the Lancet published An Open Letter for the People of Gaza, signed by five who
said they spoke for 19 others. They lambasted
“the ruthless assault” by Israel.

“We
are appalled by the
military onslaught on civilians in Gaza under the guise of punishing
terrorists,” the five
wrote. “We as
scientists and doctors cannot keep silent while this crime against
humanity continues,” the authors said.

The
journal was bombarded by letters – pro and con. Two Italians wrote:
“The renewed tragedy
of the ongoing intolerable violation of the right to life and
self-determination
of Palestinian people by the Israeli troops must be stopped.”

Many
others shared the thoughts voiced in a
letter byBruce
M. Marmor and Beverly A. Spirit: “It is totally inappropriate for a
peer-reviewed medical journal to publish purely political,
inaccurate, and prejudiced pieces... Where is the sympathy for the
Israeli citizens who live under constant rocket attacks and invasions
through tunnels that extend under kindergartens and people's homes by
Hamas, whose charter calls for the destruction
of Israel and the murder of Jews?"

The
debate was just getting started. Some
angry doctors
urged a
boycott of Lancet. On
Aug. 4, Lancet responded with an unsigned
editorial, saying
editors favored neither side, but "when one enters Gaza, it is
as if one is entering a prison. … Debris lies everywhere.”

Lancet editor Horton

The
editorial defended printing the original letter: “Here
is a war that is having far-reaching effects on the survival, health,
and well being of Gaza's and Israel's civilian residents. It is
surely the duty of doctors to have informed views, even strong views,
about these matters; to give a voice to those who have no voice."

Critics
shot back that the writers of the original letter were far from
impartial. Most had strong connections to Palestine and some had
received grants from pro-Arab anti-Israel groups.

One
of the authors, Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor who worked
extensively in Gaza, once told a Norwegian newspaper that America's
enemies were justified in the 9/11 attacks because “if the U.S.
government has a legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq,
the oppressed has a moral right to attack the U.S.”

NGO
Monitor, an Israel-based
group, focused on
two other authors, Paola Manduca and
Swee Ang, publishing emails the pair sent
to a Google group dubbed “Always Against the War.”

The
emails included a report that Egypt's new president was a secret Jew.
Another repeated Fidel
Castro's blasting the Israelis' attacks on Gaza. But the one that got the most attention was Manduca and
Ang asking the group: "Please
watch ... this video before it is removed from
circulation.”

The video
was made by David Duke, a
former Grand Wizard in the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the
founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White
People.

Manduca
and Ang said they had no idea who
Duke was when
they recommended his
video,
although Duke's
name was widely publicized in Europe in 2013 when Italy
kicked him out for trying to start an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi group.

The
NGO
Monitor report
sparked stories in the
Telegraph in London, the Jerusalem Post and other media.
Duke himself happily entered the debate, supporting the authors of the Gaza
letter: “The
Jewish extremists are stunned by the bravery of these medical
professionals” to speak out against Israelis who believe they have
a “God-ordained right to murder the hated Goyim,” Duke
wrote on his website.

David Duke

Duke,
who has run for president, has been credited in some media reports
as having put a modern
face on white supremacy, exchanging white hoods for business suits. He has said his movement wasn't
“anti-black”
but “pro-white” and “pro-Christian.”

Indeed,
the homepage
of davidduke.com has no diatribes against blacks, focusing
instead exclusively on Jews. One Duke report: “Horrors
of ISIS Created by Zionist Supremacy.”

While these
storms were raging, Epstein
in Miami was among the many trying to figure out to respond. Like many Jews, he was upset by
the intrusion of a medical journal into politics, particularly since
the
Gaza letter made no mention of Hamas and its attacks on Israel.

One
of Epstein's exchanges was with Karl Skorecki, a
longtime friend who is a nephrologist at the Rambam
Health Care, which
includes a thousand-bed
teaching hospital in Haifa and has a diverse staff. “For example,”
says Epstein, “the chief of nephrology is an Arab Muslim woman.”

Epstein
and Skorecki decided that a drawn-out boycott against the Lancet was
likely only to increase anger and not accomplish much.
Their conversation shifted toward inviting Richard Horton, Lancet's
editor, to visit the Rambam campus, talk with the staff and see for
himself a side of Israel that perhaps he didn't know about. Epstein
says he helped draft the invitation to Horton.

Editor Richard Horton speaks in Israel

Horton
accepted. In late September, he visited Rambam. After listening to
the staff and others, he gave a talk on the campus, rebroadcast onYouTube. “I
need very honestly to set the record straight with you. First I
deeply, deeply regret the completely unnecessary polarization that
publication of the letter ... caused. ... Second
...
I was personally horrified at the offensive video that was forwarded
by two of the authors of that letter. The world view expressed in
that video is abhorrent and must be condemned and I condemn it. I
have made that view, my view, very clear directly to those two
individuals.”

Epstein,
who says he's seen email exchanges between the Lancet editor and
Rambam staff, is “convinced that Horton had an epiphany, just like
on the road to Damascus, there was a change, a realization.” He says he was told that Horton was most impressed by going on rounds and seeing patients like a young Syrian who had arrived from the war-torn country with a badly injured face.

Duke's reaction: Horton “prostrated
himself before the Zionist powers and begged for forgiveness.”

As
this post is published, Horton's apology at Rambam has been seen 4,000 times.

Duke's video on the
Zionist media conspiracy has been viewed 740,000 times.